


So Darkness I Became

by Rachel24601



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Darkness, Drug Addiction, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Psychological Drama, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 08:54:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11272140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rachel24601/pseuds/Rachel24601
Summary: In the life of Michael Scofield, and in those of the people he knows and loves, there has been darkness. The only weapons that they are provided with to fight it is each other. Title inspired from “Cosmic Love” by Florence and the Machine.





	So Darkness I Became

**Author's Note:**

> This is a piece I have enjoyed writing more than I expected, due to the grimness of the theme. I hope you enjoy it as well. The song alluded to towards the end is “Heroes” by David Bowie. Feedback is always welcome.

Sara often wonders whether one is attracted to drugs by circumstances or by disposition. Do they appeal to us, because of our environment – because they are in our reach, because those who take them seem to be having a blast – or do they speak to us, from the deepest of ourselves, call out to our very essence, with the guile of the devil and promises of heaven?

The answer, in her case, is indisputable.

Sara did not love drugs because the people who surrounded her had fun with it. Her passion for morphine was inherent, irrepressible. Individual, private almost. The happiness that she felt, when morphine was coursing through her body, spreading a blissful numbness within her overworking brain, knew no match or rival. After having chased one rush after the other, studies and medicine and action, always action, Sara found peace, rest, and relief. She found herself, too.

And she loved it, most immediately, with an unconditional allegiance that could only be described as religious.

As many people who escape suffering through avoidance, Sara had taken hiding in work. In school, as early as she could remember, she had done what was in her power to be the best, not because she sought recognition or praise, but to have a life busy enough to shield herself from the tormenting truth that was to be found, in solitude.

Because Sara Tancredi had grown up in a house empty of love, had been raised by parents empty of spirit, and had always been terribly afraid to be confronted to who she was, convinced, somehow, that she would be faced with the dark immateriality of utter emptiness.

Morphine was the first repose of Sara’s exhausting flight. It provided her with a tranquility she had never found in anything, and with sufficient numbness to allow her to disregard the source. Drugs had been to her, before, what it is to any well-educated girl. Dangerous. Destructive. Sara had avoided them as she had avoided real romance, and anything likely to steal from her the rigid control with which her life was ruled.

Control had been to her an efficient tool to contain her suffering. The loss of it was a free fall down the unstable grounds of unrestricted ecstasy.

The discovery of morphine-induced happiness was so tangible, its reality so difficult to dispute, that Sara could almost completely disregard what she was losing in the process. Morphine became altogether her sickness and savior. Mindful of the details, at the beginning, Sara was like a denial-struck college girl in love for the first time. She learnt with sedulous attention what parties to be invited to and whose company to seek, to be able to be in reach of the most valued drug, and sweetened the disreputable process of the needle as well as she could, as if this were actually a mandatory vaccine shot; looking away from the square of white skin that the syringe was digging into, counting to ten and aiming for distracting thoughts.

Soon, she could not say how soon exactly, the blissful state of her intoxication washed away any need to extenuate the realities of her addiction. Morphine was something that Sara now likes to think of as a vortex – it is the only way fit to describe the effortless velocity with which it sucked in everything that she used to think mattered, her friends and family and plans for the future. Those were actually first to go, and easiest to let go of. It was yet another while before the substance took her pride, and a longer one still before it took her shame. Before she became willing to do absolutely anything to obtain it; to crawl on broken glass, or walk in a house on fire, if such things had been required.

Rapidly enough, it was no longer sufficient to know the right places to go to, to be allowed a taste of the drug. The people who owned it wanted to earn money for it; and Sara found that she could no longer be kept going just with a sample.

Impudently, Sara began to tell as many lies as was required to be granted money from her father. She can no longer recall all of them, but the barefacedness with which she told them and the utter lack of remorse is something that still haunts her now. It did not matter that her father worried. It would not have mattered, to her, that he was crawling under debts.

The prickling sensation that would run across the blue vein of her arm, as if to warn her of the risk of withdrawal, was the only thing she cared for. It woke her up in the morning and kept her up at night. The needle that, at first, she needed distraction from, had become as sweet a sight as any she could fathom.

Now, Sara doesn’t dream of making any excuses for her behavior – but she will say that it did feel as if her life depended on the regular dose of morphine that she was granted, vital, it seemed, to her functioning, on the same scale as water and oxygen.

Perhaps it would have helped, if she had been made of a stronger character, with personality traits vigorous enough to push her to rebel. Perhaps it would have made no difference.

The entirety of who Sara was, before morphine, was swept away in the hurricane-like spiral of being high. That there was no one to truly mourn her disappearance only made the process easier.

“Are you quite okay?”

Michael’s question steals Sara from the gloom of her reminiscing reverie. They are both sitting at the kitchen table, and he has interrupted his minute chopping of vegetables for Mikey’s lunchbox to pause and look at her. The book which she has been pretending to read for the past half-hour is still open at the first page of a fresh chapter. She thought it might be enough to prevent her husband from noticing what’s on her mind. He does get insanely thorough when he cooks.

“Fine.” She says; doesn’t really try to conceal the disconsolate gloom in her voice, gleaming with the untruth of her statement.

Her husband has always been one to pay attention to the smallest of details; he is an expert at catching her in those occasional moments of fleeting despondency, though this is the first time that her addiction will come up.

Michael has a lawful right to insist, and he does, “You’ve just been so quiet, all afternoon. And you don’t usually spend so much time on the same page of a book.”

She closes it right on, as an act of good faith.

Faith, Sara has learnt, is an important thing to possess.

“It’s just so silly,” she realizes it is, as she says it.

Nearly a decade as elapsed since she’s left morphine behind and it should feel as old as another life she can nearly forget has been her own. Silly is the only word for the fact that it still gets to her, now, although it shouldn’t, although she is not even the same person as that twenty-year-old girl who wanted freedom and fulfillment. Who wanted more than anything to stop being afraid of the unknown features of her identity, the desert places of her own mind and fears.

How silly it is only makes it hurt twice as much, Sara thinks, and watches the comprehension on her husband’s face, as he thinks the same thing.

“I was driving Mikey home,” she starts, without giving him the time to ask again, “and this old song came up on the radio. I used to love that song,” she adds, without sounding apologetic to omit the title, “it was the kind of music I felt privately connected to, the kind I would be outraged to hear at a party or other kind of social gathering. I listened to it, only when I was alone –” Already the ghost of her twenty-year-old self emerges from oblivion, how she would lock the door of her commodious college girl apartment, sit on the carpet of her living room, cross-legged, putting on a show of casualness for an invisible audience, and candidly roll up the sleeve of her blouse.

Telling Michael is worth the reminiscing stab that this disappeared young girl brings about. Yet, Sara finds she resents that being a mother and a wife, the title so definitive in how it sounds and how it echoes with the familiarity of a happy household, does not altogether erase her past.

“I listened to it when I got high.”

It’s surprising that her voice doesn’t jam with shame at the confession, that there is no sadness in her eyes or any other telltale sign to indicate this is not a level statement like any other, uncharged with weight or meaning.

Michael doesn’t say anything, for a long while. Their relationship is beyond any pretense, making up for their ragged start, and so he does not look deliberately earnest, or say any ready comforting words like an actor repeating lines.

“You don’t listen to it anymore.” He guesses.

“I hadn’t in a while.” Nor would she have expected that she would actually mind it, now – it’s just a silly old song about being heroes, about beating all of the rest of the world forever and ever – and yet when those first notes filled the car, leaden with the specter of Sara’s forgotten past, she could feel the electric brutality of its arising, taste the pungent ashes of its resurrection.

And just like that, while Mikey was dozing peacefully in the backseat, while she was driving towards the steady home of her healthy life, she could feel the pin-like stung of needles inside her flesh, the prickling sensation, still familiar, running up her forearm.

Michael inhales, softly, and she knows it’ll pain him to let the air out, that it hurts him to breathe when he is helpless to prevent her suffering.

“I don’t miss it,” she informs. “I really don’t. It’s just so unexpected that my body would still react to the thought of it, like waking up instantly to the smell of food when you’re hungry. I figured I would be past this, now. When I do think of morphine, which isn’t often, it’s always with this satisfying, flattering distance, like I’ve successfully buried my old demons.”

That last part is spoken half with amusement, wanting to laugh at how easy it is to imagine the eyes of her fellow addicts in rehab and meetings on her, the semblance of a jury, whose thoughts are actually running astray from every word you say, sorting through your words to give them a meaning closer to their own situations, like birds picking worms out of a carcass.

The look of unwavering affection that Michael gives her is the farthest thing from that customary attention. “Perhaps the worst things that we do,” he hazards, “the obscure places we need to visit to carry out certain actions – perhaps nothing about this darkness stays buried for long.”

It’s not what Sara was expecting him to say. It doesn’t sound very reassuring. Yet again. After all that they’ve been through, all that they’ve seen, maybe mere reassurance is beside the point.

“I think it’s okay that it resurfaces,” he admits. “When on random mornings, having breakfast with you and Mikey, I remember that I’ve had a dream about Fox River the previous night, it hits me so violently, the contrast between then and now – but I don’t try to hide it under anything, I don’t use our happiness as a cover. What I’ve been through, what you’ve been through – it’s part of who we are, part of what brought us to where we are now.”

The blunt honesty with which he speaks makes it vain for her to deflect when he wonders, “What are you afraid of, Sara?”

She’s always liked the sound of her name in his mouth. He speaks it with the lyricism of a poet and the devotion of a believer, as if she were something to be worshipped.

“What if it’s still in me,” she says, “that emptiness I was so afraid of when I started using?”

“It’d be okay if it was. You’d find ways to occupy it, to face it, that would not involve any self-harm.” He does seem to believe this, as hard as one can believe in anything. “You’ll never take morphine again, Sara.”

“But what if part of me always wants to?” That’s not really what she means, and the second attempt hits closer to home. “What if that vacant part inside of me is still there, somewhere, still terrified of its own emptiness and willing to take any escape to fill it? What if it takes over?”

“That won’t happen. I won’t let it.”

“What if it swallows me?”

“I won’t let go. Look at me, Sara. I won’t let go.”

The briefness of her questions and his replies is like a game of throwing something at each other and giving it back. The placating quietness of his words slowly overcomes her rapid heartbeat and shallow breath, the uneasiness in her mind is sucked back in.

The look in his eyes is earnest, steadfast, and Sara holds on to it, waits for it to restore her life as she knows it, the peacefulness in her mind riding on a quiet blue wave.

Without breaking eye-contact, Michael bypasses the table to break the distance between them, and when the warm palm of his hand rests on her shoulder, brushing her neck, she knows for sure that the war against the needle-prickling in her arm is won. Her husband’s hand is still damp from the raw vegetables he was chopping and he smells faintly of cilantro.

“I love you so much,” she says.

He smiles and leans in to kiss the top of her head, then takes a long inhale. The strawberry shampoo she uses is his favorite – he says it makes holding her feel like a never-ending summer.

“I know,” he answers, and after a few minutes, when he can tell she’s okay, he walks back to his own side of the table, and starts chopping vegetables again.

Maybe there is no such thing as never-ending summers, Sara thinks, watching the beautiful man in front of her cooking dinner for their son, and that doesn’t seem to matter.

They will face winter together, when it comes.


End file.
